The Spring Clean Team Tidying our beaches

Lyndsay Platt is helping to eliminate the litter blighting our beaches…

When I moved to Devon from Bristol a few years ago, whenever I went down to the beach to walk my dog I would notice the amount of rubbish,” says Lyndsay Platt.

“I started taking an extra bag and filling it up with rubbish every time I went to the beach. I’d find things that the tide had washed up and also things that had been dumped there – plastic bottles, pieces of broken up polystyrene, little bits of rope. I’ve seen a whole range of things, including car tyres, shotgun cartridges, buoys, fenders that have come off boats.

“Once I even found the back of a television.”

“When I relocated to Westward Ho! I set up The Glorious Oyster food shack in a converted horsebox trailer by the beach. It was a business I had started while I was living in Bristol, with the idea of bringing oysters out of fancy restaurants and back onto the streets, making them more accessible to everybody.”

At the food shack and now her cafe at nearby Instow, Lyndsay sells a variety of fresh local seafood, shellfish and beach-inspired dishes, largely sourced from the local fishing industry and local businesses.

Sustainability is a key feature for her business, which has won an environmental award.

“Around the same time I started the shack at Westward Ho! I became involved with local beach clean schemes. I wanted to do my bit for the environment and try and encourage people to do theirs as well.

“At our organised beach cleans, a real mixture of people come along, from a few regular individuals to young families, retired people and sometimes also holidaymakers who have popped down to do their bit.

“Quite a few people come along after moving to the area. It is a way for them to get out and about and to get to know the area, meet new people and feel like part of the community. It also helps to give them a sense of ownership of where they live.

“We encourage people to spread themselves along the beach and they collect rubbish for about an hour. Sometimes there might be a lot of rope or netting washed up so one group might concentrate on that, while another might spend time in one area sifting through seaweed or bits of driftwood to remove all the bits of plastic.

“Others might just walk along a section of beach and pick up stuff as they see it.

“Young children might only come back with a couple of plastic bottles but just for them to be involved is great, and of course they get a sense of the importance of doing their bit and it instills a good habit.

Also, people seeing a group cleaning the beach might then think to take a bag and collect some rubbish when they next go there, too.

“My business does not sell any bottled water and we have a sign on display explaining about reducing plastic waste and the environmental impact of producing bottled water.

“Instead, we offer free water top-ups and we are registered with the Devon refill scheme, which allows people to identify where they